As we follow a genuine path of
practice, our sufferings may seem to increase because we no longer hide form
them or from ourselves. When we do not follow the old habits of fantasy and
escape, we are left facing the actual problems and contradictions of our life.

A genuine spiritual path does not
avoid difficulties or mistakes but leads us to the art of making mistakes
wakefully, bringing them to the transformative power of our heart. When we set
our to love, to awaken, to become free, we are inevitably confronted with our
own limitations. As we look into ourselves we see more clearly our unexamined
conflicts and fears, our frailties and confusion. To witness this can be
difficult. Lama Trungpa Rinpoche described spiritual progress from the ego's
point of view as "one insult after another."

In this way, our life may appear as
a series of mistakes. One could call them "problems" or
"challenges", but in some ways "mistakes" is better. One
famous Zen master actually described spiritual practice as "one mistake
after another," which is to say, one opportunity after another to learn.
It is from "difficulties, mistakes, and errors" that we actually
learn. To live life is to make a succession of errors. Understanding this can
bring us great ease and forgiveness for ourselves and others - we are at ease
with the difficulties of life.

But what is our usual response? When
difficulties arise in our life we meet them with blame, frustration, or a
sense of failure, and then we try to get over these feelings, to get rid of
them as soon as possible, to get back to something more pleasant.

As we quiet ourselves in meditation,
our process of reacting to difficulties will become even more apparent. But
instead of responding with automatic blame, we now have an opportunity to see
our difficulties and how they arise. There are two kinds of difficulties. Some
are clearly problems to solve, situations that call for compassionate action
and direct response. Many more are problems we create for ourselves by
struggling to make life different than it is or by becoming so caught up in
our own point of view that we lose sight of a larger, wiser perspective.

Usually we think our difficulties
are the fault of things outside us. Benjamin Franklin knew this when he
stated:

Our limited perspective, our hopes
and fears become our measure of life, and when circumstances don't fit our
ideas, they become our difficulties.

A Buddhist writer I know began his
practice with a well-known Tibetan teacher many years ago. The writer didn't
know much about meditation, but after some preliminary instruction he decided
that enlightenment was for him. He went off to a hut in the mountains of
Vermont and brought his few books on meditation and enough food for six
months. He figured six months would perhaps give him a taste of enlightenment.
As he began his retreat he enjoyed the forest and the solitude, but in just a
few days he began to feel crazy because as he sat all day in meditation his
mind would not stop. Not only did it think, plan, and remember constantly, but
worse, it kept singing songs.

This man had chosen a beautiful spot
for his "enlightenment." The hut was right on the edge of a bubbling
stream. The sound of the stream seemed nice on the first day, but after a
while it changed. Every time he sat down and closed his eyes, he would hear
the noise of the stream and immediately in tune with it, his mind would begin
to play marching band songs like "Stars and Stripes Forever" and the
"The Star Spangled Banner." At one point the sounds in the stream
got so bad he actually stopped meditating, walked down to the stream and
started moving the rocks around to see if he could get it to play a different
tune.

What we do in our own lives is often
not different. When difficulties arise, we project our frustration onto them
as if it were there in the children, the world outside that was the source of
our discomfort. We imagine that we can change the world and then be happy. But
it is not by moving the rocks that we find happiness and awakening, but by
transforming our relationship to them.

The Tibetan Buddhist tradition
instructs all beginning students in a practice called Making Difficulties into
the Path. This involves consciously taking our unwanted sufferings, the
sorrows of our life, the struggles within us and the world outside, and using
them as a ground for the nourishment of our patience and compassion, the place
to develop greater freedom and our true Buddha nature. Difficulties are
considered of such great value that a Tibetan Prayer recited before each step
of practice actually asks for them:

Grant that I may be given
appropriate difficulties and sufferings on this journey so that my heart may
be truly awakened and my practice of liberation and universal compassion may
be truly fulfilled.

.... In difficulties, we can learn
the true strength of our practice. At these times, the wisdom we have
cultivated and the depth of our love and forgiveness is our chief resource. To
meditate, to pray, to practice, at such times can be like pouring soothing
balm onto the aches of our heart. The great forces of greed, hatred, fear, and
ignorance that we encounter can be met by the equally great courage of our
heart.

Such strength comes from knowing
that the pain that we each must bear is a part of the greater pain shared by
all that lives. It is not just "our" pain but the pain, and
realizing this awakens our universal compassion. In this way our suffering
opens our hearts. Mother Teresa calls it "meeting Christ in his
distressing disease." In the worst of difficulties, she sees the play of
the divine and in serving the dying poor, she discovers the mercy of Jesus. An
old Tibetan lama who was thrown into a Chinese prison for eighteen years said
that he viewed his prison guards and torturers as his greatest teachers.
There, he says, he learned the compassion of a Buddha. It is this spirit that
allows the Dalai Lama to refer to the Communist Chinese who have occupied and
destroyed his country as "my friend, the enemy."

What freedom this attitude shows. It
is the power of the heart to encounter any difficult circumstance and turn it
into golden opportunity. This is the fruit of true practice. Such freedom and
love is the fulfillment of spiritual life, its true goal. The Buddha said:

Just as the great oceans have
but one taste, the taste of salt, so too there is but one taste
fundamental to all true teachings of the Way, and this is the taste of
freedom.

This freedom is born out of our
capacity to work with any energy or difficulty that arises. It's the freedom
to enter wisely into all the realms of this world, beautiful and painful
realms, realms of war and realms of peace. We can find such freedom not in
some other place or some other time but here and now in this very life. Nor do
we have to wait for moments of extreme difficulty to experience the freedom.
It is, in fact, better cultivated day by day as we live.

We can begin to find this freedom in
the everyday circumstances of our life if we see them as a place of our
practice. When we encounter these daily difficulties, we must ask ourselves:
Do we see them as a curse, as the unfortunate working of fate? Do we damn the?
Do we run away? Do fear or doubt overcome us? How can we start working with
the reactions we finds in ourselves?

Often we see only two choices for
dealing with our problems. One is to suppress them and deny them, to try to
fill our lives with only light, beauty, and ideal feelings. In the long run we
find that this does not work, for what we suppress with one hand or one part
of our body cries out from another. If we suppress thoughts in the mind, we
get ulcers; and if we clench problems in our body, our mind later becomes
agitated or rigid, filled with unfaced fear. Our second strategy is the
opposite, to let all our reactions out, freely venting our feelings about each
situation. This, too, becomes a problem, for if we act our every feeling that
arises, all our dislikes, opinions, and agitations, our habitual reactions
grow until they become tiresome, painful, confusing, contradictory, difficult,
and finally overwhelming.

What is left? The third alternative
is the power of our wakeful and attentive hear. We can face these forces,
these difficulties, and include them in our meditation to further our
spiritual life.

. . . Our difficulties require our
most compassionate attention. Just as lead can be transformed into gold in
alchemy, when we place our leaden difficulties, whether of body, heart, or
mind into the center of our practice, they can become lightened for us,
illuminated. This task is usually not what we want, but what we have to do. No
amount of meditation, yoga, diet, and reflection will make all of our problems
go away, but we can transform our difficulties into our practice until little
by little they guide us on our way.